


Losing Face

by hellkitty



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: M/M, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-16
Updated: 2013-11-16
Packaged: 2018-01-01 18:27:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1047153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Luna-1, Whirl's doing his duly allotted therapy again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Losing Face

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alliterate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alliterate/gifts).



“I like what you’ve done with the place,” Whirl said, perching on the exam couch.

Rung looked up from the datapad, blinking slowly. “They just, uh, refabricated everything like it was before, uh, Fortress Maximus’s ‘incident.’”

“Yeah, I know. I'm  digging the whole nostalgia trip.  Really. Another mech might have used the opportunity to, you know, go for some color or maybe some impressionistic art slag on the walls, but not you.”

“...thank you?” I think?  That...was that an insult? It was always hard to tell with Whirl, even after all these years. And only partly because of the lack of a face. Whirl could give conflicting messages with his body language and voice and sometimes alternating in the space of a microklik, and it was utterly impossible to know which to believe. Sometimes, Rung wondered if that wasn't how Whirl was--at such conflict with himself.

“Yeah. Nice to see someone sticks with the classics.  All the, you know, bare metal and exposed rivets and all that. Got a real vibe, you know, an anesthetic.”

“I think you mean ‘aesthetic’?”  He did want mechs to be relaxed in his office, just not, you know, that relaxed?

“Yeah.” Whirl waved one claw dismissively. “That too.”

Still, now Rung was looking at the room, with the same battleship grey paint as before and wondering if, maybe, he could have gone with something a little less...stark.  At least a warmer color, something that would contrast with the bleak canvas of space outside the windows. Maybe a mural.

“Reminds me of the good old days,” Whirl said, stretching out on the couch, making a show of crossing his ungainly feet.  “You know, Kimia and all that slag.”  

“The good old days,” Rung said. It was a sound technique, to echo part of the client’s speech, mining for details, validating.  

“Yeah, you know. The Wreckers. All those psych evals.” He gave a contented sort of sigh. “Good times.” He looked over, yellow optic fixing its bead on Rung’s face. “Come on, don’t tell me you don’t miss it.”

“All right.”  Honestly, he wasn’t sure if he missed it. He’d felt like he was doing something good back then, serving an important function. And by all means, he should feel it even more, now, when he didn’t have mechs’ lives in his hands, but after Red Alert, after Fortress Maximus...he was beginning to doubt that.  

“Yeah, you don’t have to tell me. I know.”  Whirl gave a knowing nod, and tangled his claws together on his chassis.  “Bet it was kind of a power trip, yeah?” 

“How so?”

“Oh, you know. Holding careers in your tiny little orange hands.  I mean, Impactor hated you.”

“I remember.” His hand drifted to his throat. He remembered Impactor and that one meeting very well.  He’d taken himself through a course of writing therapy, just to be safe. “And you? Did you hate me, too?” It would stand to reason, after all.

“Frag no!” Whirl said. “Fraggin’ hated all the downtime, but you know, talking to you was kinda fun. Not like, you know, writing reports for Springer." A frustrated tic of one foot. "One fraggin' comma splice and you'd think the world was gonna end or something.  And you should see him with...what the scrap did he call them?  Misplaced mogrifiers or something. He'd go fraggin' ballistic, so, whatever they were, musta been pretty important. Some kind of verbal munition."  

Rung didn't care for misplaced modifiers himself, but he wasn't the patient, here. Besides, the things he’d seen go through the ethics committee, honestly verbal munitions would almost have been tame. “I’m surprised those are the good days for you.”

“You kidding?  All the fragged-out weapons we got to test?” He nearly bounced on the couch, his entire body animated with expression.  

“I just, I imagined that the time before the war was, well, a positive time in your life?”  It was in Rung’s, feeling like he was on the threshold of something new and wonderful, each day seeming to unveil fascinating insights into the behavior of his fellow mechs.

“You imagine wrong,” Whirl said, his voice suddenly going flat, draining of the animation.

“But, when you were talking to Fort Max?”  All those things he’d never told Rung, in all their sessions. And Rung had to wonder why.

“When I was talking to Fort Max, yeah, I was saying whatever to keep him interested.”

“So that was all a lie?”  Whirl was normally a far worse liar than that. Maybe Whirl had been holding out on him, though, like a game.

Whirl shifted on the couch. “Nah. It was true, it was just, you know, stupid.”

“I didn’t think it was stupid.” Rung toyed with the stylus of his datapad. He doubted asking would garner a straight answer, but at this point, there was no harm in trying.  “I wondered why you didn’t, you know, in all our sessions, mention any of that.”

“Just said it: it was stupid.”  Whirl readjusted his shoulders on the couch.

“I think it was important. You know, in making you who you are.” The clockmaker, with principles, who tried to stand up for himself, in the face of an unimaginably brutal bureaucracy.  

“Hey!” Whirl sat up, feet kicking the air. “I made me who I am. I did. This slag? “ He waved his claws. “This slag is just, you know, bonus features.”  

Rung knew evasion, covering. It wasn’t a lie, so much as a feint, an attempt to make him not see. This was a familiar part of the dance with Whirl, and he knew what to do: step aside, reset. “You could always get new hands.  Red Alert..well...his are available.” Grim understatement, but the war had been full of them.  And he hadn’t become hardened to them so much as determined to find the positive in things.  Red Alert certainly wasn’t using them any time soon.  “I could perhaps pull a few strings with Rodimus and Ratchet, if you’d like.”

“I wouldn’t fraggin’ like,” Whirl said. “Like I’d want Captain Crazypants’s hands. I mean, how much ego you gotta have to imagine the whole fraggin’ world’s out to get you? Seriously.” He leaned over, dropping his voice to conspiratorially soft. “That mech has issues.”

The present tense was interesting.  “Whirl,” Rung said, shaking his head. Bad Whirl: you don’t talk bad about other patients. “You have issues, too, you know.”

“Frag yeah I do!” Whirl bounced on the seat again, almost excited. “But mine are cool.”

“I...don’t follow?”

“Mine, you know, I got to do cool things. Blow slag up, fly into the sharp pointy teeth of epic danger and stab it in the tongue….or something.”  He shrugged.  “You know, in the action.”

Stab it in the action? He was beginning to feel what must have been Springer’s pain reading those reports. Rung shook his head, squeezing his optics shut.  “You mean the chance to do good?” It had held so many mechs together during the war, the thread of belief that they were helping the cause, saving their brothers, that it was all worth the cost.

The blue headbell swung at him in something like slow-motion disbelief, and Whirl spoke like he’d never actually heard those words together. “Do...good?”

“Help the Autobot cause? Freedom for all sentient beings? Fighting alongside your comrades?” Rung had no idea: he wasn’t a warrior, at all, but he’d heard the reasons thousands of times from mechs seeking therapy.  

A long moment, and a slow motion blink of the amber optic. And then the head fell back, and Whirl burst out laughing, so hard that his feet and claws flailed.  For a moment Rung wondered if it was a bit too much, a bit forced. But if so, Whirl was very committed to his overdoing, chest guns spinning in mirth.  “Right. Right. Oh, frag.” A claw waved in the air, almost helpless, before brushing under his optics as though wiping away a tear of laughter. “Good one, mech. Really had me going there for a klik.”

He rolled onto his side, taking a moment to arrange himself into a parody of a sexy pose. At least...Rung hoped it was a parody. “Listen. There’s one reason I’m an Autobot, and only one.”

“You...like killing people.”  He’d done enough evals on Wreckers to make that not so wild a guess.

“That’s just, like, extra credit or something.” He waved a dismissive claw. “Real reason I’m an Autobot is Megatron hates me more than Optimus.”

“I think a lot of Autobots can say that, Whirl. Unless you mean he hates you more than he hates Optimus.”  Which Rung would doubt based on empirical evidence.

Whirl looked almost offended. “Yeah, no. They both hate me. And he’s hated me longer, so there.”  Whirl gave a smug nod.

Persecution complex? That would be a new symptom.  Run frowned, worriedly. He’d thought that Whirl maybe was improving, at least after Luna 1.  “Not everyone hates you, Whirl. You even saved Rewind’s life.”  

“Shhhh! Frag! Keep that scrap down.”  The yellow optic darted around the room, anxious. “Look. That was just, you know, a thing.  That happened.”

“It was a kind thing you did, Whirl. And I heard you were quite heroic on Luna-1, rescuing the Circle of Light.”

“I wasn’t rescuing anyone. I was being an ultimate badaft. Like I do.” The spindly arms folded over his chassis.

“It was all about you.”

“Slag yeah. Whirl: kicking aft and not even bothering to take names even after the war.” The headbell bobbed in a contented nod.

“But you don’t want to be thought of as someone who saves lives?”

“That,” Whirl said, “is for chumps. Whirl is not a chump.”

“Whirl is also referring to himself in the third person.”

“Because Whirl is just that epic.”

Or, Rung thought, Whirl is that detached from himself.  He jotted a few notes in his datapad.

“Hey,” Whirl said, in the quiet. “We met, you know, before the war.”

“We did?” Rung looked up, puzzled. “I remember the Rodion police, but…”

“Yeah, no. Springarm did the intake for that whole thing.” He shrugged.  “Figured he’d have to write the reports that way.”

“When?” Rung’s eyebrows knotted, trying to remember that far back. He remembered Maccaddam’s, the barfight, where he’d first run into Impactor. He remembered being excited, young, a bit of an enfant terrible, with his theories of personality and mind and the excitement of riding right on the wrong edge of the Functionists.

A long look, and Whirl subsided back onto the couch. “Polyhex. The Dead End. I tried to con you into buying me a drink.”

“I...don’t remember.” Rung’s whole face furrowed, scanning back. No one’s memory was perfect, even data hubs like Rewind. Rung knew--he’d written papers--on memory: distortion and emotion and how selective the mind was, discarding whole terabytes of ‘irrelevant’ data every klik. He wrung his hands over the datapad.  “I’m sorry.”  

Whirl’s chassis heaved, then released a long, rattling sigh. “Yeah, no big deal.  Guess I wasn’t so memorable back when I had a face.”  He looked down at his claws, clicking them like castanets for a long moment, before looking back over at Rung, his voice febrile-bright. “Hey, at least you talk to me now, right?”  


End file.
